For mortgage lenders, lots of technology solutions have come and gone, but today’s most popular social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are here to stay—and are changing how homes are bought and sold. With more people relying on social media and peer recommendations to make big decisions, mortgage lenders are paying attention and reaching out on social networks to reel in prospects.
There are several benefits that social networks can provide for lenders. The ads in the real estate section of the local newspaper continue to diminish as lenders discover they can more precisely target their prospects online, according to demographics like location, interests and economic details. Lenders can then turn to social media to place listings for specific prospects with more accuracy, where they look for and share information.

Even better, lenders can often place the right information in front of the right people at exactly the right time: when they might be looking to buy. People who want to buy now expect to be able to get relevant information from their social networks whether they’re at home on their tablet, at work on their laptop, or checking their phone while running errands. It’s now the lenders job to meet them where they are online, and then transform them into a borrower.

As a result, lenders have become good at using social media to get those prospects, with the idea that the ones who become happy customers will share their experience within their networks, and increase referrals.

The Regulatory Dilemma

Despite the advantages of social media, lenders face a challenge: they’re trying to figure out how to continue to market effectively, while also following the new social media oversight regulations from the Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) and the agencies that are governed by it, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the National Credit Union Administration, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The new regulations outline how lenders can compliantly use social media and website communications.

More specifically, the FFIEC guidance states: “A financial institution should have a risk management program that allows it to identify, measure, monitor, and control the risks related to social media.”

Among other risk-management necessities, this means your business needs a system to monitor the posted content found on your company websites and social media properties, originating from any device or server, including those found in any of your branch offices.

Managing the Overwhelm

Your compliance team is probably already managing a number of other industry rules and regulations, so the extra cycles caused by these new regulations can be impactful and overwhelming if you have limited resources.

Lenders are also worried about taking a misstep with social media, and landing in the middle of regulatory enforcement actions or fines. Last year, there were several instances in the news where the CFPB and FFIEC handed out sanctions to lenders who didn’t follow the new social media rules.

With no more room for error, how can lenders keep their marketing engines revving, and still stay on course with the regulators?

One thing’s for sure: you can’t rely on social media sites to help with regulatory compliance or maintenance of an audit trail. Social media sites aren’t responsible for holding these records. Your company must find a reliable and realistic way to monitor and produce social content for examiners, and also maintain an audit trail that shows posts were monitored.

Looking to Technology for Help

If the task of managing social media compliance seems like too much to handle, you’ll be happy to know that lenders and their compliance teams are turning to technology to help enable their business goals and enforce compliance policies. Along with a sound social media policy, a comprehensive social media and web archiving and monitoring solution will allow you to:

• Set up policies that automate monitoring of content that has been posted to your company’s social media accounts or websites.
• Immediately surface actual risk for compliance review, including posts and content that were published on your social media sites, but may be non-compliant with regulations.
• Help you enforce your company’s established social media compliance policies.
• Provide an audit trail that can track when a social media post or interaction happened, and show any corrective actions that took place after published content was reviewed.
• Enable your marketing and legal teams to also view and review social media content when needed.

As a lender, you need to know when a branch office manager or lending officer posts sensitive or non-compliant content—for instance, misleading claims about current mortgage rates. When you to turn to technology to manage this, you’ll find there are intelligent solutions available now that can help your compliance team automate the monitoring of social media content, and surface flagged posts that present real risk so they can be further reviewed.

Social media is how business is being driven these days and where you find customers; it’s not realistic to ignore it. With a little preparation to set up the right social media policies and monitoring solution, however, you can manage requirements under the new regulations and still stay active on social media.